In praise of the spreadsheet
The enduring and essential interface breaks rules, wreaks havoc, and has a permanent place in our hearts
Most of us could only dream of designing something as successful as the spreadsheet. It is so ubiquitous, so seemingly timeless and elemental, that today one has a hard time imagining it being designed by humans at all, as if it emerged magically of its own volition from somewhere deep in the mists of computing history.
Its patterns and logic are now accepted and ingrained to the point that, as designers, we co-opt them for our own purposes, assuming they will make our own designs more understandable and easier to use (and usually realizing later that a spreadsheet already fills whatever need we’re trying to address, and probably much better).
Despite the fact that spreadsheets throughout the corporate world tend to be riddled with wildly expensive errors, nobody in their right mind would suggest getting rid of them. They rose to prominence in a time before help was a Google search away, when figuring out how to solve a problem meant either struggling through impenetrably dense documentation or, hopefully, making friends with an Excel whiz (of which every workplace needs at least one).
It has a million and one uses, from boring business-y ones like monitoring budgets and tracking schedules, to fun stuff like wireframing, making art, recreating classic games, and, uh, solving linear programming problems in operations research (trust me, this is both cool and powerful!). You can bet that there are at least as many uses still out there waiting to be discovered, most of which will solve problems that we haven’t even yet conceived of.
Heuristics? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And yet, the wild success of the modern spreadsheet program flies in the face of so much conventional wisdom! With all of its hidden features, lack of affordance, and confusing information architecture, it would never survive a modern design critique. If it were a new product, it would fail a standard usability test miserably. It has an outrageously long (but not steep) learning curve.
Given our industry’s current approach to problem solving, it is nigh impossible to imagine a design student today coming up with anything like it. How could we possibly define a problem such that something this wide open would be the solution?
UX Designers love to use Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design as a rubric for judging interfaces. The spreadsheet finds this hilarious. Here, look:
Heuristic #3: User control and freedom
Users often perform actions by mistake. They need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted action without having to go through an extended process.
Reality: ever mess up one of those complicated formulas, which you had been tweaking over the course of days, which refers to some other cell in some other sheet, which itself refers to yet another cell? Maybe you used a relative reference where you should’ve used an absolute reference, but you don’t realize something’s wrong until a few steps later? You could try doing a bunch of Ctrl-Zs, but who the hell knows how that will turn out? Yeah, good luck finding the emergency exit!
Heuristic #5: Error prevention
Good error messages are important, but the best designs carefully prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions, or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to action.
Reality: the latest versions of Excel and Google Sheets warn us when they think that our formulas are bad, although their definition of “bad” is pretty limited. Even that is a very recent development. For decades, if we weren’t making wacky mistakes in our spreadsheets, were we even trying?
Heuristic #6: Recognition rather than recall
Minimize the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another. Information required to use the design (e.g. field labels or menu items) should be visible or easily retrievable when needed.
Reality: that formula you used that one time for that other thing, which would be perfect for the thing you’re trying to do now… do you happen to remember it? No? Here’s a huge list of bizarrely named functions for you to stare at like a schmuck. Have fun!
Heuristic #8: Aesthetic and minimalist design
Interfaces should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in an interface competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Reality: Yeah, so about that… Excel was already hugely popular when it looked like this:
Heuristic #9: Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no error codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Reality: where the friendly products that Nielsen envisions would hold your hand and gently explain what happened and how to fix it, a spreadsheet will stick its thumb in your eye and sashay away cackling.
Meet me where I am
Why do we put up with all of this nonsense? Isn’t there some other, more pleasant way to solve our problems? Nope. In spite of all of its overt hostility, the spreadsheet overflows with its own uniquely lovable qualities. If there is another interface that does a better job of molding itself to any level of expertise, I’ve never seen it. Call it strategic affordance: features in spreadsheet programs have an uncanny way of being discovered exactly when you need them. In fact, let’s imagine your journey from the very beginning.
The day you learn how to enter text into a computer interface is the day you can use a spreadsheet for its most basic purpose: making a list. So, maybe you decide that this is how you’ll track your spending. Well! Now you’ve got an easy to maintain, easy to read audit of money in and money out. Cool!
Pretty quickly, you realize that it might be useful to do some analysis, and so you start thinking about how helpful it would be if your spreadsheet could add up all those numbers for you. Hey now! You discover that a formula can save you the trouble of doing some simple arithmetic. Nice!
You’re cooking with gas now, and so you get a little fancier. You figure out that you can use slightly more arcane formulas to compute averages, allowing you to forecast your budget for the next few months. Whoa!
You’re only beginning to glimpse the power and majesty of the spreadsheet, but now you’re hooked. You want to solve your next spreadsheet puzzle. You’re headed down a path lined with pivot tables, charts, and filtered data views. It’s all so beautiful.
Each step of the way, magically, just as you are starting to feel stuck, you notice some inconspicuous little button or menu, which you never paid much attention to before, but which now looks like the key to solving your problem. So you try it, and how about that? Incredible! You find exactly what you need to take the next step.
Sweet triumph 😤
This path is endless and challenging, always with new problems to solve, and new ways to solve them, and the spreadsheet has a way of repaying our effort along the way. Its currency is thrills and status.
The thrills are intoxicating. They’re what you feel when you level up, the visceral satisfaction you experience in solving a particularly thorny spreadsheet problem, of making it actually do what you need it to do. The spreadsheet provides an inexhaustible supply of eureka moments, none of which would be possible to experience if not for the struggle leading up to them. Once that dopamine starts flowing, you do not want it to stop.
The feeling of achieving status as your power continues to grow is more subtle, but no less potent. The ability to bend data to your will in a spreadsheet is arguably the most valuable skill you can bring to a workplace. There are few ways to endear yourself to your colleagues more than by saving them time and headaches through working your magic on their Google Sheets.
Who doesn’t want to be a hero? As the hero, how can you not appreciate the source of your superpower?
What can we learn?
In the sense that designing the spreadsheet is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle, this level of success is not easily repeatable.
And yet, it was conceived of and developed methodically by humans, just like you and me, in order to solve a fairly straightforward and mundane problem. When you listen to the story as told by Dan Bricklin, the specific human who designed and built the first computer-based spreadsheet program with a visual interface, you’ll be struck by how many of the elements of modern product design were present, all the way back in the 1970s before any of this stuff was formalized. You’ll pick up on a human-centered approach, a deep understanding of the problem, an iterative process of prototyping and testing, of learning through mistakes.
But while Mr. Bricklin’s process looks familiar to those of us who toil in today’s Design Thinking factories, he also worked free of the rules and constraints that dictate so much of how we operate. Free to follow his instinct, to do what felt right, he blended inspiration, intuition, determination and method to realize his vision. Here he is recalling how his formative years learning to code informed his sense of possibility. Note how he attributes the core, defining features of his masterpiece to his imagination:
“Most programmers in those days worked on mainframes, building things like inventory systems, payroll systems and bill-paying systems. But I had worked on interactive word processing and on-demand personal computation. Instead of thinking about paper printouts and punch cards, I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers.”
This rest is both history and legend. It’s the story of a design whose impact is felt far beyond its original intent. It’s a testament to what we can accomplish when we apply the science and the art of our practice with passion, a deep understanding of a problem, and, of course, a once-in-a-lifetime idea.
Hey, while we’re waiting for inspiration to strike, let’s see if there’s anything good on YouTube!
